As games gravitate online, integrate the use of new peripherals, and are programmed for a wider array of mobile platforms, the skill sets required to build and market those games will, in many respects, differ greatly from past and present skill set expectations. Whether you are currently working in the industry or looking to get in, you need to know the skills required to build the next generation of games. And for those who don’t build the games, but, rather, build the business, what skills will game companies be looking for from its marketing, PR, and finance specialists? This series of articles will address what you need to know, how you go about acquiring that knowledge, and how best to apply it to your career. You will also get an inside view of how the industry’s biggest employers plan on maximizing efficiencies within their own organizations. Who will be hired? How will employers train current employees to assume new responsibilities? And what skills will they be looking for to support the increased number of multiplayer and persistent world games on their production and development schedules?

The industry has come a long way in a short period of time, and advances and changes continue to happen at an ever increasing pace, but with a little effort and direction you can definitely keep up. The first part of this series will overview mobile games, just one of the "hot" areas of game development, with tips on what skills you need to know as a programmer, artist, or designer, and go-to resources for getting your own skill set up to par.

Why is this a "hot" area? Take a quick glance at the upcoming list of industry events, and the impact of mobile games is readily apparent. Not only is the Game Developers Conference again presenting "GDC Mobile", but other big mobile game events on the horizon this year include the "Mobile Entertainment Summit" at CTIA WIRELESS 2004, the Games and Mobile Forum, and iWireless World just to graze the very tip of the iceberg.

The appeal of mobile game development is fairly obvious. The team size is typically a fraction of the size of a typical development team, the development cycle is a few months versus a few years, and the budget is generally less than $60,000 in contrast to more than $1,000,000. Moreover, phones are portable, networked, and more than one billion mobile phones are in use today. Whether mobile games will prove to be everything they’ve been hyped to be remains to be seen, but, for now, mobile games are hot and, consequently, so are those people with the skills to make them.

Getting Mobile
Games developed to run on mobile or "cellular" phones are typically referred to as mobile games or, in many instances, wireless games. Unlike those games already embedded on your phone, this area of game development more directly refers to downloadable games. Mobile games also include SMS (Short Message Service) games which deliver short text messages from one phone to the other. Further, according to Nokia, just about every phone shipped since 1999 includes a Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) browser. Very simply put, WAP games are played by going to the game provider’s URL to download and view pages. For purposes of this article, however, SMS and WAP will not be addressed.

Rather, the hot area now for mobile game development, and for the foreseeable future, is mobile games developed on platforms such as BREW and J2ME, as will be discussed in greater detail, below. Briefly, BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) is a platform that allows for several different languages to work with a mobile device, including C++, Java, XML, Flash, etc. Similarly, J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) has a set of specifications that allow for a subset of the normal Java classes to work with a particular group of devices. Not all aspects of the language are supported, however, and different devices expose different capabilities for each. These tools give mobile game programmers an interface to the hardware just like other SDKs (Software Development Kits) such as the PS2 API (Application Programming Interface).

Because the mobile environment is platform driven, the industry is seeing now, and can expect, in addition to J2ME and BREW, a much more advanced class of middleware than what the PC market typically sees. Companies such as Nokia, Siemens, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson will be the catalyst for bringing stakeholders -- that is, mobile phone manufacturers, distributors such as Verizon, Sprint, Cingular, etc., as well as the content developers or, in other words, essentially everyone in the value chain -- to a standard, promoting that standard among handset manufacturers, and providing the development communities with licensable middleware. The issue will undoubtedly become whether the stakeholders building the standard can accurately assess the real needs of the gaming consumer.

As is usually the Darwinian case, certain of the species have risen to the top. Today, the most common mobile game platforms are Java and BREW. Symbian, as Low further explains, a platform supported by Nokia, the market leader in handsets, has gained significantly more traction in Europe than the U.S. That trend may not last for long, however. Games developed on the Symbian platform that demonstrate the advanced capabilities of Nokia phones make Nokia a friend of the developer and may be an entry point for developers to reach carriers.

Key Skills and Resources for Mobile Game Programmers
As always, the best way to keep up to date with current job skill requirements is to look over job listings. Check the website of your favorite developer, this publication has ongoing job postings as well, or check the sites of recruiters such as GameRecruiter.com who tend to have dozens of listings of a wide variety. The following is a job listing posted on January 15, 2004 for a mobile game programmer:

Java and J2ME: Invented by Sun Microsystems in 1995, Java technology lets devices of all kinds run different kinds of program. Today, Java technology is embedded in approximately 150 million mobile phones allowing the user to view and choose from a list of applications, games, and services. The application is then sent over the air to the handset, where it is installed and instantly available to use.

J2ME is a form of the Java language that is optimized for small devices such as mobile phones. J2ME is limited by comparison to desktop Java, but it significantly improves the ability of mobile phones to support games. While it is not the only interpreted language deployed on phones, it has become an industry standard backed by many of the big manufacturers and, therefore, knowledge thereof is becoming increasingly important.

BREW: Qualcomm’s BREW is not only a C/C++ API for the mobile phone platform, it is also a certification and distribution model for getting mobile phone applications out to your audience. While Java, at this point, is the more widely used platform, as it is also an open platform, it provides less developer support. Further, as there are many varieties of Java from which to choose, the code doesn’t always work when porting the game to multiple versions. However, Java returns more revenues to the developer. BREW, on the other hand, provides developers with more end-to-end support and billing functions. But with more support for developers comes a lower percentage of revenues back to the developer. Projections have more than 500 million BREW handsets in the market by 2008.

Further, as Nokia’s N-Gage is based on the Symbian OS, this allows game developers to start developing games for Symbian phones and move on to N-Gage game projects smoothly because the underlying technology and development tools are similar. As with BREW, the programming language typically used for Symbian OS is C++.

"In the mobile world where memory is expensive it is best to avoid using several objects unless truly necessary…This may sound easy, but trust me for those of you who are use to separating tasks into several objects and heavily rely on patterns will find reverting back to a more procedure way of development a challenging thing to do."

In a nutshell, due to the platform limitations, it is vitally important for programmers to be able to write efficient and compact code, and a good understanding of the language features (C/C++/Java) is valuable.

Key Skills for Mobile Game Artists
Do the skill sets for mobile game artists differ significantly from other platforms? What’s the difference between painting on a wall and painting on a stamp? Artists, nevertheless, will typically see the same skill sets required as on other games, with the one notable exception of a slight more emphasis on 2D skills.

Lastly, the most important thing for an artist in the mobile gaming world is to be flexible, and be willing to be the jack-of-all trades. Specialization will continue to grow, but, for now, the artist has to be willing to do anything and everything, from creating pixel fonts to animating polygon models.

Key Skills for Mobile Game Designers
Designers for mobile games face some rather unique challenges. In December 2003, at the Second Annual Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia in Sweden, keynote speaker Ernest Adams addressed "Practical Considerations of Mobile Game Design". This lecture addressed some of the practical considerations surrounding mobile gaming from the perspective of the game designer. Mobile games have a number of advantages and limitations not found in other forms of video gaming. In addition to the usual issues surrounding the small size of the device, and the features offered by networking, the designer must take into consideration such contingencies as the personal safety and security of the user, and the circumstances in which the game may be played (on foot, in a vehicle, etc.). Playing games on a mobile phone, it would seem, entail more than the occasional danger of spilling Mountain Dew on the couch. While seemingly mundane, these and other factors influence the designer's creative choices, and it is better to understand them in advance than to create an innovative game, which proves to be unplayable or unsalable for practical reasons.

Jess Dominguez, also of Monkeystone, summarizes that the reality of shorter shelf lives and smaller budgets for mobile games necessitates making important trade-offs in game design, and devising simpler yet creative gameplay elements that still result in a fun game.

As it with all good game designers, regardless of platform, scheduling and good communication skills remain a must. Game designers must be able to create tight schedules with a quick turnaround that take into account the maximum number of supported platforms, as well as the short-term foreseeable need for ports.

The mobile industry moves even more quickly than the PC industry. This fast pace, combined with additional lag times for contract negotiations with providers, BREW (or equivalent) provider-based testing, lower development budgets, and an emerging lag in game deployment by providers, all serves to pressure development teams to reduce their time to market. For example, Don McClure of Digital Element, says his company develops BREW and J2ME games from concept to completion in three months or less. By utilizing a global hybrid development approach, employing both full time and permanent overseas programmers – which is why he suggests that game designers also be familiar with languages such as Russian, Chinese and Hindi – as well as veteran Western-based development talent, McClure says he is able to achieve high production value with reasonable costs and schedules.

The designer must also consider the most appropriate means of generating revenue from a small game. As Low suggests in his article on how to make money from mobile games, design consideration examples include games that include updates or a global high score, games that incorporate on-going events, such as sports-based games, and games where the players can download add-ons are all examples. Developers may also consider incorporating "micropayment" elements to their game. For example, for 50 cents a gamer could download a tire upgrade in a racing game.

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